The Allies refused to negotiate terms while he remained in power. In the end he had abdicated rather than be deposed, but only after his strict condition was granted, the proclamation of his four-year-old son as Napoleon II. But the little emperor’s ‘reign’ was less than two weeks, because the Duke of Wellington had other ideas. Instead, he proclaimed the return of the Bourbons and invited Louis XVIII, the overweight successor to his executed brother Louis XVI, back to Versailles.

Meanwhile, Bonaparte stayed on at the Elysée palace. Here he met with his ex-wife Josephine’s daughter, Hortense, who was both his stepdaughter and, through her marriage to his brother Louis, his sister-in-law. He sought Hortense’s permission to come to the Château de la Malmaison where, in the days of the Consulate and before his marriage to Josephine soured, he had enjoyed family life with his wife and her children. When he had heard news of Josephine’s death in May 1814 when he was in exile on Elba, it was said that he locked himself in his room for two days.

Hortense still liked to be addressed as the ‘Queen of Holland’; Louis Bonaparte had been imposed on the Dutch throne by his imperial brother but had now been supplanted, and the couple had long since separated. It was an open secret in Paris that Hortense was involved in a passionate affair with General Auguste Charles, Comte de Flahaut, Napoleon’s aide-de-camp in the Russian campaign and at Waterloo.10 Four years earlier, in Switzerland, she had given birth to a son by Flahaut; it had been discreetly arranged for the child to be raised by a landowner in the West Indies.

Friends advised Hortense against taking Napoleon into her home but she did not heed them. Bonaparte’s mother and brothers arrived at Malmaison with a group of supporters. Among them was Hortense’s lover, Comte de Flahaut, who soon left on a hopeless mission to request more time from the provisional French government. However, he will appear again in an unexpected role in this story.

Instead of making his escape, Bonaparte lingered five days in some kind of emotional paralysis, reading novels and essays about America, where he planned to seek refuge. An adviser had suggested that from there ‘you can continue to make your enemies tremble. If France falls back under the Bourbon yoke, your presence in a free country will sustain national opinion here.’11 He thought often about Josephine and told her daughter: ‘Poor Josephine, I cannot get used to living here without her. I always expect to see her emerging from a path gathering one of those flowers which she so loved . . . How beautiful La Malmaison is! Wouldn’t it be pleasant, Hortense, if we could stay here?’ ‘I could not reply,’ wrote Hortense, ‘my voice would have betrayed all my emotion.’12

Guns rumbled in the distance. Blücher’s Prussian army was advancing fast and Bonaparte’s options for escape were closing. He decided at last to quit the country with his brother Joseph and sail to America—but he knew that the English anticipated this and their navy blocked the Channel. With Joseph and some faithful officers and servants he would aim instead for the port of Rochefort on the Bay of Biscay.

Finally, Bonaparte stood facing his strong-willed mother, Letizia, known throughout Europe as ‘Madame Mère’. Hortense reported that they gazed silently at each other, then Letizia stretched out both her hands towards him and in a clear sonorous voice said: ‘Farewell, my son!’ He gathered her hands in his, looked long and affectionately in her face and, with a voice as firm as hers, exclaimed: ‘Farewell, my mother!’13

Travelling in a series of carriages, spaced well apart, the fugitives reached Rochefort on 8 July. The valet Marchand rode in a carriage crammed with the accoutrements of gracious living that he had hurriedly packed—his master’s campaign bed, table linen, a Sèvres porcelain dinner service, gold plates, silverware, an assortment of snuff boxes and almost six hundred books. At Rochefort the group boarded the frigate La Saale, but it could not weigh anchor for Boston. The harbour was emphatically blocked by the 74-gun British warship HMS Bellerophon and two naval frigates.

Bonaparte resolved to surrender, bargaining on the British sense of justice he claimed to admire. He told General Bertrand: ‘It is better to risk confiding oneself to their honour than to be handed over to them as de jure prisoners.’ He had in fact few alternatives: the naval blockade prevented his escape by sea, while General Blücher and the Bourbons wanted him shot. First though, on 13 July, he penned a grandiloquent letter to the Prince Regent, comparing the English royal to the King of the Persians who offered safe harbour to his enemy:

Royal Highness—A victim to the factions which divide my country, and to the enmity of the greatest Powers of Europe, I have terminated my political career, and I come, like Themistocles, to place myself at the hearth of the British people. I place myself under the protection of their laws, which I claim of your Royal Highness as of the most powerful, the most constant and the most generous of my enemies.
—Napoleon14

It is doubtful if the Regent saw the letter until much later, but when he did, despite his image as a wastrel and a rake, the reference from Plutarch’s Lives would not have been lost on him; he was said to be ‘probably the only prince in Europe . . . competent to peruse the Greek as well as the Roman poets and historians in their own language’.15

Bonaparte sent Gourgaud and Las Cases under a flag of truce to deliver the letter to the Bellerophon.